On the road of recovery: The interaction between media framing and equity market in the post-financial crisis

By examining the tone of U.S. newspaper coverage regarding the strong stock market recovery in 2013, this thesis seeks to discover the relationship between media framing and the equity market. It also aims to discover the intermedia agenda-setting between The New York Times and Wall Street Journal. One hundred and eighty-five news articles from these two newspapers were selected from LexisNexis and wsj.com from January 1 to December 31, 2013. These articles were framed into five issues: Market Performance, Government Policy, Economy, Industry and Company, and Investors. Cohen's Kappa was used to test reliability. By using quantitative content analysis and a correlation test, this study found that during 2013, the strongest recovery year of 2008 financial crisis, the economic news stories regarding stock market were framed favorably more often than unfavorably. To investigate the relationship between the tone of media coverage and the performance of the stock market, this research conducted the correlation analyses between three consecutive days' stock market changes and the tone of news coverage in three levels, newspaper combined, separately, and the issue framed. Intermedia agenda-setting was not evidenced between these two newspapers, and no significance was found between the current or future stock market performance and the tone of the news coverage on either level. The research results did demonstrate a statistically significant correlation between the previous day's stock market performance and the tone of news coverage on all three levels. It suggested that the news coverage from these two newspapers reflected the stock market changes in different levels.